OpenStack Day Canada Recap

The first ever OpenStack Day in Canada happened on November 22nd in Montreal, Quebec. This was great for many, many reasons, and here is a quick recap of the event.

OpenStack is alive and well despited the many pundits who are apparently calling for it’s demise. What we are seeing across the industry is the commoditization of the IaaS layers and below, which includes OpenStack. In other words, OpenStack is becoming like the furniture; it’s there in the room and you expect it to be there, but we are moving on to decorating the walls now.

Kubernetes Still a Hot Topic

The buzz around Kubernetes is very real. We are looking at Kubernetes both above and below the OpenStack layers. Developers and container consumers are latching onto the potential that Kubernetes has opened up with the fast growing contributions from inside and outside of the Google camp.

The reason that Kubernetes keeps coming up around OpenStack is that it is a great partnership to fill out the overall infrastructure story.

We have the hope that a generic data center operating system will be a combination of both VM/instance and container as the consumption models, hosted on a platform which can span the various hosting platforms. This means that we will see a sort of criss-cross of technology which ultimately presents a generic consumption model for multiple workloads:

Using both HTTP and API as the access points, we can use either containers or traditional instances on OpenStack, while spanning various infrastructure for hosting OpenStack itself. Much more to come on that in an upcoming post!

180 Attending first OpenStack Day in Montreal

The organizing team, led by Jonathan Le Lous, did an amazing job of pulling together sponsorships, presenters, and ultimately filling seats for our first OpenStack Day which was at the historic Notman House in Montreal. We had a phenomenal crowd who brought in ideas from all areas in the industry. This really shows that the community is growing, and we are going to use this momentum with future OpenStack Days events in other locations in Canada!

The event sponsors were great supporters both leading up to and on the day of the event. We were especially pleased with the amount of Canadian representation we saw from the sponsor list. Another great sign for technology and open source north of the 49th parallel!

Lots of Questions – Lots of Collaboration

The vibe of the event was much more around how to do OpenStack better, and how to use it more. In past meetups and other smaller events, I’ve seen a stronger focus on discovery and asking how to get started. The general community attending the event seemed to be comfortable with the reasons for OpenStack, and the comfort with getting started. This indicates for me that we are evolving the conversations towards advancing ourselves as OpenStack users. Very exciting to see!

Upgrading is Still a Challenge and a Hold Back

There was no elephant in the room on the topic of upgrades and interoperability. The top questions around infrastructure operations was around upgrades. In other words, how can we safely and efficiently upgrade OpenStack once we have it in place. I tried to look for the ultimate answer which would work for the entire group, but realized that we have a few ways that we must attack this challenge.

Packaged distros may be frowned upon by many of the OpenStack development community and pundits, but the most successful stories in the room also came from many consumers of packaged OpenStack distros. Much work is being done around better upgrades, and a lot of it is also going bring Kubernetes to the fore again.

Thank you Everyone!

The event was excellent because of a lot of tireless effort by many involved. Thank you to the organizing team, sponsors, attendees, and all the folks at the OpenStack Foundation who are doing everything they can to enable events like this. The community is the best way to continuously engage and learn about how we can make OpenStack better.

I’m looking forward to the next OpenStack Summit in Boston. Look for a follow up OpenStack Day event in Toronto as our next target, most likely after the Boston event.